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ParaSail[0] is a parallel language that is being developed by Ada Core Technologies. It evaluates statements and expressions in parallel subject to data dependencies.

The paper ParaSail: A Pointer-Free Pervasively-Parallel Language for Irregular Computations[1] contains the following excerpt.

"This LLVM-targeted compiler back end was written by a summer intern who had not programmed in a parallel programing language before. Nevertheless, as can be seen from the table, executing this ParaSail program using multiple threads, while it did incur CPU scheduling overhead, more than made up for this overhead thanks to the parallelism “naturally” available in the program, producing a two times speed-up when going from single-threaded single core to hyper-threaded dual core."

One anecdote proves nothing but I'm cautiously optimistic that newer languages will make it much easier to write parallel programs.

[0] http://www.parasail-lang.org/

[1] https://programming-journal.org/2019/3/7/




I hope so too.

I want to emphasize that what was discovered by those papers is that if you take existing programs and squeeze all the parallelism from them you possibly can safely and automatically, it doesn't get you very much.

That doesn't mean that new languages and/or paradigms may not be able to get a lot more in the future.

But I do think just bodging promises on to the side of an existing language isn't it. In general that's just a slight tweak on what we already had and you don't get a lot out of it.




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